Six young critics from different academic and professional backgrounds came together for the 20th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, 27 – 30 March 2025 as part of the Early Career Critics Programme.

They were joined by established critics Lauren Velvick, Sophia Satchell-Baeza and Tendai Mutambu, who led workshops on writing, interviewing and pitching.

Rosalind Duguid

Rosalind is an artist and writer born in London and based in Newcastle Upon Tyne. She is interested in the role of the photograph in the late capitalist economy and how we live amongst the images we create. She uses text, drawing, sculpture, metalwork and electronics to explore these themes. She has a BA in Fine Art from Newcastle University and has previously worked as a writer and editorial assistant for Elephant Magazine.

Ghada Habib

Ghada is a writer, researcher, and programmer based in Leeds. She recently completed a PhD at the University of Leeds. Her project focussed on the contemporary artist John Akomfrah and the relationship between his rendering of montage, conceptualisation of history, and criticism of colonialism. She is currently a writer for the visual arts platform Corridor 8 and has previously published with LUX as part of a research residency.

Read Ghada’s interview with Helen Blejerman here.

Caitlin Ivory

Caitlin Ivory is an event setups coordinator and Letterboxd enthusiast based on the coast near Newcastle upon Tyne. She is an erstwhile filmmaker who contributed a short film to BFMAF’s 9th edition and went on to study film theory and history at King’s College London. More recently, she returned to academia, undertaking a master’s degree in Film Curation at the University of Glasgow. She completed a combined written and audio visual thesis on memes and online cinephilia, as well as a stint working at HippFest in Bo’ness. She is interested in DIY film exhibition spaces, feminist modes of expression, and the often ironic film criticism that emerges when new technologies clash with legacy media.

Milda Valiulytė

Milda is a curator, arts worker and film programmer. Their practice is guided by a desire for connection and questions around art’s role in our collective liberation. Milda is currently coordinating projects at Scottish Documentary Institute and is part of the selection team for Glasgow Short Film Festival, alongside other interdependent curatorial projects. Their latest co-curated programme Collective Dreaming has been presented in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and Meno Avilys & SODAS 2123 in Vilnius.

Read Milda’s piece, Queer (re)Memory at the 20th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, here.

Juwairiyyah Wali

Juwairiyyah is a British Mirpuri film curator and cultural worker based in Birmingham. In her curatorial practice, she is drawn to themes of rebellion, transgression, punk and futurism as applied to South Asian contexts – as well as feminist, queer and post-colonial modes of interpretation. Juwairiyyah first entered the Film Exhibition sector through the Independent Cinema Office’s FEDS scheme in 2022, and is currently working with Flatpack Festival in their programming team. This is alongside completion of a programming internship with BlackStar Festival in Philadelphia since January 2025, where she supports the programming of their experimental and documentary film strands. Most recently, she has been selected by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival to join their 2025 Early Career Critics programme. In an effort to increase access to independent and experimental film in her home city, Birmingham, Juwairiyyah co-founded Radical Exhibition Collective in 2024 – a film exhibition collective dedicated to diasporic programming and platforming subaltern expression in film and moving image.